Envy and Blame

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pilate “knew that it was out of envy that [the Jews] had delivered [Jesus] up.” It was evident to anyone with half a brain that the chief priests and the teachers of the Law were out to get Jesus because they feared for their position and reputation. Caiaphas himself said prophetically that “it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.” (John 11:50) They feared that if Jesus were elevated in the estimation of the people, the whole nation would follow after Him, and the priests and scribes would be dishonored.

Envy leads people to do some awful things. It leads to wars and genocides. It leads to murders and beatings. It leads to discrimination and division. It leads to people whom you might consider otherwise neighborly and peaceable doing and saying things that are downright despicable and destructive.

Of course, envy is nothing new.

"Like A Weaned Child"

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Long ago, the legend holds, Daedalus and his son Icarus were imprisoned by the wicked king Minos in a high tower atop a cliff overlooking the Aegean Sea. Daedalus determined that their only means of escape would be to build wings and soar off like birds. Being an engineer and a clever man, Daedalus constructed a set of wings covered with bird feathers held on with wax. He made a set for himself, and one for his feckless son Icarus. Before they set out on their escape, Daedalus warned his son not too fly too low to the sea, lest his wings become waterlogged, nor too high in the sky, lest the sun warm the wax and cause the wings to melt. They launched into the bright Grecian sun, and were free!

However, hapless young Icarus soon became overwhelmed with the power of flight and wheeled too high into the heavens. So close to the sun he went that his father's warning proved true. His wings melted and came apart, and the poor boy fell and drowned in the sea. He did not heed sound counsel, but lifted up his eyes and his heart to things beyond his powers, and was destroyed for want of wisdom. So goes the efforts of the people of this world in attaining knowledge and understanding of things not given to them.

Ubi Jesu, Ibi Vita

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In the middle of winter, even a well-managed cemetery is a bleak place to visit. It is not designed to be this way: trees and shrubs and flowers are carefully planted to give color and beauty to the resting place of loved ones, to a site of mourning and grief. But winter comes with cold winds and freezing temperatures, with snow and ice. Life retreats: green disappears, the lawns turn brown, leaves fall, and branches look like dead sticks while the gravestones stand sentry and time goes on. For those weeks of winter, it is a place where all seems dead. This year, it seemed like the cemetery itself was buried under a cloak of white death.

But it is not so. Though sometimes it seems like it will never happen, the sun will rise higher with warmth and light, and the cemetery will be more a like a garden again. Those trees and shrubs and lawns are not dead forever; they are merely dormant, waiting for the sun to bring them back to life.

With that, the Lord teaches us an important lesson: what is true for the trees is also true for the people of God who rest from their labors. The Son of God comes to bring them back to life. Where Jesus, there life.

Rescue Me!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

As we have gathered together these weeks to mark the Lenten season, we have meditated on the Psalms of Trust, as they are often called. Tonight we turn our attention to Psalm 71, and we learn from the Psalmist how we ought to trust in the Lord in the face of opposition for the sake of the Word.

“In you, O LORD, do I take refuge; let me never be put to shame!”, cries the Psalmist. Whither shall you go for refuge in this world? For you are like Peter, faced with the choice of belief or disbelief: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Shall you go to the scholars of this age? They will tell you that refuge is to be found in health and wealth. They will give you prescriptions for every ailment under the sun, and then more prescriptions to counteract the prescriptions they prescribed in the first place. They will tell you to put your money in this or that or the other thing. Invest in gold; invest in farmland; invest in emerging markets; invest in “glocal” businesses.

The Blind Servant

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In the ancient world, and even into the middle ages, to be blind left open a peculiar set of employment options. Two jobs often reserved for blind men were poet and prophet/priest. In many cults of the past, the prophet or priest or seer was often blind. It was thought that a blind prophet had his power to see the physical world replaced with an ability to foresee the future, or to see the will of the gods.

The blind poet is a stock figure in history. Legend has it that the great Greek poet Homer was blind, as well as John Milton, James Joyce, and several other significant writers throughout history. Church history even has its own blind bard, if you will – the fourth-century Alexandrian theologian Didymus the Blind, known for his incredible memory and stirring theological insights. The archetype of the blind poet assumes that because one has been deprived of the physical sense of sight, the eye of the mind is opened to other ways of thinking and processing, and thus new forms of creativity.

Today's Old Testament lesson speaks of the blind and deaf servant of the Lord.

God Has A Mom

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It is fitting that we should pause in our Lenten observance, these nine months before Christmas, and contemplate the joy of our Lord’s Annunciation. For it is God’s good and gracious will that those who are humbled and fatigued by the grief of penitence and who mourn deeply for their sins, might be consoled by the Word and promise of God whose Son, born of Mary, takes away the sins of the world.

The angel sent from God comforted Mary with these words: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.”

He promised more than a Son to the Virgin. In this, he also promised pardon to the guilty, redemption to the captives, and opening of the prison to them that are bound. He announced the Kingdom of the Son and in that Kingdom the glory of the righteous and the reward of faith. The Name Jesus – The Lord who saves – is the terror of Hell and the joy of Heaven.

Water and Marriage

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today you have heard about the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. Like most of the vignettes in the Gospels, a great deal of ink has been spilled in attempting to tease out the meaning and significance of this account.

The structure of this account bears striking similarities to the account of Abraham's servant seeking out Rebekah for marriage to Isaac. Only here the bridegroom is not the far-off son of an unknown master, but the Great Bridegroom Himself, the very Son of God, only-begotten of His Father from all eternity. And the Bride is not just one beautiful woman, but the one most desirable to the Bridegroom – the bride whom He has washed clean and sanctified by His own blood and with His innocent suffering and death.

Today, our Lord gives us a lesson in the importance of the Church.